Pitney Bowes, global provider of commerce-powering solutions and products, announced the four winning submissions from their Pitney Bowes Global Hackathon that was held from September 29th through October 8th, 2017. Developers and startups were tasked with creating applications to assist the 1 million plus Pitney Bowes’ clients.
The Hackathon enabled developers, both big and small, to leverage Pitney Bowes technology and gain a wider customer base. The Pitney Bowes SMB Startup Portal simplified access to the tools that are needed for developing high-quality applications being promoted by the Hackathon.
The focus areas of the Hackathon were: ecommerce, customer support, customer relation management, on-demand shipping, and marketing, with the applications judged on their technical complexity, user experience, and business potential.
The four hackathon winners are:
- First place: “Ordoro for C-Series” by Ordoro uses Pitney Bowes SendPro C-Series device for printing labels and managing inventory that enables small businesses to sell to more than one e-commerce marketplace.
- Tied for second: “Track My Package” by Ian Noronha and Sharan Lobana of the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee tracks shipments in real time.
- Tied for second: “Same-Day Delivery” by Santosh Bhutkar and Pratiksha Dikshit uses UberRUSH integration to allow same-day delivery of packages.
- Third place: “ShipBot” by Margaryta Ostapchuk, a Microsoft Canada Technical Evangelist, is a smart customer support solution leveraging ChatBot to manage shipping needs and customer support via mobile devices.
Over 2,000 developers were involved that resulted in 65 submissions of technology solutions, including designs and concepts from AI-focused Algorithma.
Algorithma’s CEO, Diego Oppenheimer, commented on the Hackathon in a press release, saying that, “Small businesses are transforming and Artificial Intelligence provides them with an edge to make their business processes smarter. By offering our algorithms to the global developer community of Pitney Bowes, we saw high-value solutions come out of the Global Hackathon in just a week’s time.”
